What Am I, A Deer?

A 12-year-old girl in her mother’s nightgown sings Céline Dion in front of a thousand people, almost completely oblivious to her own bravery. Years later, on a tram, a man proffers her forgotten umbrella. Polly Barton’s unnamed protagonist is, as her author once was, a translator of Japanese for video games in Germany. She’s taken a new job in a city where she knows nobody and is trying to make friends, going out for karaoke and fantasising about more meaningful work and an imagined future with a man she’s barely spoken to, rather than the stylish but uninspiring man she’s actually dating.

Barton seems to take pleasure in writing the almost untranslatable. Sprawling sentences meander back and forth with disconcerting elegance around a character whose internal world is in flux. Song lyrics in place of chapter breaks provide pause and an emotional soundtrack. The prose is precise and specific, a pleasure to read aloud (as Barton herself has done for the audiobook, which is available on Libro). This isn’t one to rush, it deserves an opportunity to breathe.

The title comes from a series of short films by Isabella Rossellini titled Seduce Me, in which Rossellini is courted by a series of disembodied hands and puppets simulating animal mating rituals. Barton’s novel, too, offers this precise blend of irreverence created with serious skill. It’s not to be binged, but savoured and shared with ELO’s (Electric Light Orchestra) Out of the Blue cranked at full volume. It is, on one hand, an opportunity to relieve the maddening, joyful and devastating feelings of obsessive love, fantasy and projection. But, so much more than that, Barton captures the unspooling and re-forming of identity and self-awareness that can come from living alone in a new place, and the power of a voice – be it solo karaoke or Céline Dion to an audience of a thousand.